Season’s First Big Storm Sends Drivers Skidding : Weather: Some areas get 2 inches of rain. Motorists have tough time, but ski areas celebrate a foot of snow.

Some took to the mountains, braving the miserable prospect of wrestling with tire chains. Others headed to the beach for a chance to surf waves reaching eight feet in Santa Monica Bay, despite warnings of high bacteria levels from storm-drain runoff.

And then there were all those motorists on Saturday, banging into each other on the freeways, creating traffic nightmares throughout the Los Angeles Basin.

In short, weather ruled the day as a series of frosty northern storms marked the season’s first big rain in Southern California, bringing with it cheers and jeers.

By late Saturday, the National Weather Service said, 1.06 inches of rain had fallen on the Los Angeles Civic Center. Santa Barbara was pelted with 2.80 inches and Woodland Hills with 2.02 inches, while Long Beach received 0.94 of an inch and Newport Beach only 0.47.

A second, equally potent storm is expected to hit Los Angeles early today, carrying with it just as much rain, if not more.

And a third is waiting in the wings, which could make a lot of folks in Pasadena unhappy, because it’s scheduled to arrive on New Year’s Eve or early New Year’s Day--just in time for the Rose Parade. Rain or shine, officials said, the parade will go on.

In the mountains--far above the flooding, mudslides and power failures--ski-area operators were positively giddy that roughly a foot of snow had fallen on what is traditionally their busiest week. So were the skiers.

“Hey, I can’t ski on rain, so I left it behind and came to the snow,” said Bob Miller of Bellflower while zipping his down parka in the parking lot of Mountain High, a ski area nestled 7,000 feet above Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains.

“There are hits everywhere,” said snowboarder Micah Stepanian of Wrightwood, savoring the best day of snow in years. “Hits are jumps. You can jump off things.”

“It’s like another world up here. It’s such a getaway,” added Lynn Cullough of Palmdale, who said that earlier in the week she was in a frenzy, selling jewelry to last-minute shoppers at a J. C. Penny. “Now I feel like going home to a Christmas tree and turkey.”

Skiers were not the only people enjoying the storm. Los Angeles County lifeguards said that some surfers were shredding storm-churned waves--despite county health department warnings that the rains were pushing bacteria-tainted runoff out of storm drains and polluting coastal waters.

Lt. Mickey Gallagher said that Saturday’s storm-stoked surfers “just shined us on” when they were warned that they should stay on the sand because of the pollution potential in Santa Monica Bay.

“Most of them are aware of it and they’ll take their chances,” Gallagher said. “They want to get the ultimate wave.”

On the roadways and freeways, there was no getting away from the inevitable crashes and tragedies.

One person was killed on the rain-slickened Santa Ana Freeway in Irvine, and six cars and three trucks--two of them loaded with highly flammable cargoes--piled up in a major crash Friday night on the Long Beach Freeway in Compton.

Intermittent rain also caused a flurry of fender-benders around the county, including three minor accidents involving nine cars on the Ventura Freeway in Calabasas. Among the victims: a CHP cruiser that was hit while parked on the shoulder as the officer was investigating another accident.

“We’ve had more accidents, a tremendous amount more than normal,” said CHP Officer Steve Munday. “I ran a log last night . . . and we had 44 accidents just in one hour. I’m sure we had at least a couple hundred over the night. We were running about 40 an hour over the first couple of hours.”

In Orange County, a sudden surge of runoff sluicing down the Santa Ana River nearly washed away four homeless people who had camped under an overpass to escape the downpour. Stranded on a pylon in the middle of the swollen waterway, they were rescued hours later by firefighters.

Rains loosened rocks in Malibu and sent them tumbling onto Pacific Coast Highway, which was closed between Malibu Canyon and Kanan Dume roads. On the other side of the road, storm-driven waves as high as seven feet pounded the beach. Portions of Malibu Canyon Road also were blocked by falling rocks.

Rain also flooded several streets and some lanes of the Harbor Freeway in South-Central Los Angeles, with water levels high enough in one spot to float a car off its wheels.

In Ventura County, California 33, a state highway leading to popular campgrounds in the Los Padres National Forest, was closed by snow above Wheeler Grove, the Highway Patrol reported.

Still, authorities blamed most accidents on poor driving, not extreme weather.

“The rain was the original cause (of the Ventura Freeway accidents), but, as usual, people were going too fast,” said Capt. Doug Silgen of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. “Somebody skidded into one car, which slammed into another, and then somebody hit the center divider. Then a couple of looky-loos spun out down the road.”

“It doesn’t rain in California, so people are just inexperienced at driving in inclement weather, and whenever we have a good rain it seems to bring out the worst,” said Sgt. Martin Dailey of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “People tend to not slow down or take into account visibility and slick roads.”

In addition to road floodings and bad driving, there were a number of power failures throughout the region.

“Some outages lasted for a few minutes, others for a few hours,” said Lucia Alvelais of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Some hit two houses, others hit 800 customers.”